It is no accident that my friends talked about the medical school examination in their blogs recently. The fourth week of April had passed, and the year-end examination is looming large on the horizon.
Mention final examination, and most of us envisage a medical ward flooded with medical students at every corner, making every effort to see – and touch, if lucky enough – their patients. Like it or not, a grizzled man with artificial heart valves becomes a popular Hollywood movie star, and the hospital is virtually awash with his fans.
This is a race final year medical students have wrestled with for years. And it is symptomatic of all the pressures put together, after five years of medical education.
It would seem to be a truism that a medical student must do well in the final examination in order to be a great doctor. However, I believe that reality is not quite clear. The ability to feel a skin-deep spleen in the examination can earn you good marks or even get on the dean's list. So what? The sense of professionalism is never palpable in the examination setting. As it turns out, there is really not much we can correlate with a student's task of being a professional.
Which brings me to the numerous studies performed at Harvard Business School: those studies were designed to figure out which factors are correlated with a student's future achievement. They've looked at courses taken, marks earned, and all manner of other variables, including height. Unfortunately, there seems to be no relationship at all between the grades a student receives, and his or her later degree of accomplishment. Short-term correlations, yes; long-term, none at all.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Taste
My elder brother came to visit us recently, after working in the United States for more than ten years.
One afternoon I took his family to a food kiosk selling the local street snack "eggettes." That's real Hong Kong style mini-pancake made from special frying pan and served hot. I didn't realize that it is my brother's son, but not his father, who loves these eggettes the most.
Thinking about the changing taste with age, I am often reminded of my experience with cotton candy. As a boy I had not much chance to have cotton candy. I grew up with the belief that cotton candy is one of the most amazing foods in this planet. You'll never know how big a loss that was for me to get a chance to try, and then disappointed by, cotton candy in a carnival many years later at Edmonton. That doesn't mean the cotton candy wasn't sweet. It was. The candy went down sweet, but once done, little substance remained, and even that vanished quickly.
The message is: You can't – and, in fact, you're not supposed to – know exactly what your taste looks like when you get older.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers a great lesson about olive: "It's an acquired taste. It is not easy to pop that round odd thing into your mouth. But as you grow up, some things you didn't like, because they're strong, become absolutely delicious."
One afternoon I took his family to a food kiosk selling the local street snack "eggettes." That's real Hong Kong style mini-pancake made from special frying pan and served hot. I didn't realize that it is my brother's son, but not his father, who loves these eggettes the most.
Thinking about the changing taste with age, I am often reminded of my experience with cotton candy. As a boy I had not much chance to have cotton candy. I grew up with the belief that cotton candy is one of the most amazing foods in this planet. You'll never know how big a loss that was for me to get a chance to try, and then disappointed by, cotton candy in a carnival many years later at Edmonton. That doesn't mean the cotton candy wasn't sweet. It was. The candy went down sweet, but once done, little substance remained, and even that vanished quickly.
The message is: You can't – and, in fact, you're not supposed to – know exactly what your taste looks like when you get older.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott offers a great lesson about olive: "It's an acquired taste. It is not easy to pop that round odd thing into your mouth. But as you grow up, some things you didn't like, because they're strong, become absolutely delicious."
Monday, April 6, 2009
Grandpa
My father asked me to go with him paying respect to our grandpa this Ching Ming Festival. His eyes were hopeful, his face eager. His son was ambivalent.
I'm sentimental about many things concerning my grandpa: the memory of going out with him when I was young, the time when I went to his home every day to have wound dressing for his foot ulcer, the night I accompanied him to have foot amputation at the operation theatre, the scene of buying him beer (alas, by the doctor of a patient with diabetes mellitus) in the hospital. But grave-sweeping eight years after his death leaves me cold. It's a festival that has not an iota of idea of what it’s really about. Or at least whom it is dedicated for.
In the interests of domestic harmony, I visited my grandpa's grave with my dad, and observed thousands of people climbing the slope to burn the paper offerings. There's nothing wrong, of course, with spending money on the gold and silver offering paper. Love or passion, apparently, can sometimes be measured in physical quantities. A grandson might measure it in gallons of beer he brought his grandpa; and the grave-sweepers in terms of the height of the stack of paper offerings awaiting to be burnt. For many of us, though, there is confusion between genuine belief of this folk ritual and pretended dialogue with our ancestors – or worse still, with the peers.
I'm sentimental about many things concerning my grandpa: the memory of going out with him when I was young, the time when I went to his home every day to have wound dressing for his foot ulcer, the night I accompanied him to have foot amputation at the operation theatre, the scene of buying him beer (alas, by the doctor of a patient with diabetes mellitus) in the hospital. But grave-sweeping eight years after his death leaves me cold. It's a festival that has not an iota of idea of what it’s really about. Or at least whom it is dedicated for.
In the interests of domestic harmony, I visited my grandpa's grave with my dad, and observed thousands of people climbing the slope to burn the paper offerings. There's nothing wrong, of course, with spending money on the gold and silver offering paper. Love or passion, apparently, can sometimes be measured in physical quantities. A grandson might measure it in gallons of beer he brought his grandpa; and the grave-sweepers in terms of the height of the stack of paper offerings awaiting to be burnt. For many of us, though, there is confusion between genuine belief of this folk ritual and pretended dialogue with our ancestors – or worse still, with the peers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
